Gandalf, like all the five wizards of Middle Earth, was a Maia, an angelic spirit of the same order as Sauron. It was the persistence of Sauron’s power into the Third Age that made the Valar of Valinor, a higher order of spirits, wish to send emissaries to aid and inspire those of the Free Peoples who resisted evil. The emissaries would be Maia, clothed in the bodies of Men advanced in age but possessed of great physical and mental power. So embodied, they would lose a great deal of their natural power; they were not meant to exercise force nor to coerce anyone to act. They would also be subject to weariness, hunger, injury, and the risk of death. Possessed of free will, they could also be tempted away from their task.

With his long robes, pointed hat, and immense power, Gandalf the Grey is the archetypal wizard of modern fantasy. Sent to the shores of Middle Earth to contest the influence of Sauron, he was tireless in his task, and the only of the five wizards to hold true to it until the end, according to J.R.R. Tolkien. As the Grey Pilgrim, Gandalf helped to seed the downfall of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings and even in The Hobbit, but along the way, he was transformed into Gandalf the White. This Gandalf was more directly involved in the final conflict of The Lord of the Rings. Yet it is as the Grey that Gandalf is best known, and Ian McKellen and Peter Jackson both preferred the first incarnation of the character. A casual fan may wonder why Tolkien wrote in a change of wardrobe at all.

In Unfinished Tales, a collection of essays and story fragments Tolkien left behind, it was the Maia Olórin who became incarnated as Gandalf. He was proposed for the task by Manwë, wisest of the Valar, though Olórin initially begged not to be sent. He wasn’t up to the task, he insisted, and he feared Sauron. But in Manwë’s eyes, that was all the more reason Olórin should go. Thus ordered, he arrived as the third of the Istari (wizards), appearing the smallest and most aged of them. Yet Círdan the shipwright, who greeted Olórin upon his arrival, perceived him the greatest of the Istari and gave him the Elven Ring of Fire to aid him in his labors. But the ring, and the power he still possessed, were kept veiled in weathered gray robes.

While Saruman the White settled in Orthanc, Radagast the Brown in Rhosgobel, and the two Blue Wizards beyond reach into the East, Gandalf the Grey (as the Men of Middle Earth named him) wandered throughout the West, where the Elves and the descendants of Númenor opposed to Sauron were strongest. He became a good friend to the Elves and to hobbits, while with Men he could be warm and irascible by turns. If Lady Galadriel of Lorien had her way, Gandalf would have been the head of the White Council formed to unite the West against Sauron. But Gandalf refused the position in favor of independence. He did stir the Council to put forth its power to drive the Necromancer – Sauron in disguise – from the fortress of Dol Guldur in Mirkwood, a business which took him away from the dwarves’ quest in The Hobbit. That quest was one he had helped to organize as a means to take Smaug away as a potential ally for Sauron. All this holds true in Tolkien’s books and Jackson’s films, though the timeline and details differ markedly.